Problem Description

Given an array of strings named words, the goal is to find the maximum product of the lengths of any two words in the array that do not have any letters in common. More formally, we want to find the maximum value of length(word[i]) * length(word[j]) where word[i] and word[j] are such that no letter appears in both words simultaneously. If there are no such pairs of words that satisfy this condition, the function should return 0.

Intuition

The straightforward approach to solve this problem would be to compare each pair of words and check if they have any common letters. However, this would require checking every pair which leads to a time complexity of O(n^2 * m), where n is the number of words and m is the average length of a word, rendering this approach inefficient for large input sizes.

To optimize this, we can preprocess each word to create a bitmask that represents the set of characters of the word. In the bitmask, the i-th bit is set if the word contains the i-th letter of the alphabet. Since there are only 26 lowercase English letters, this bitmask can be represented by an integer. By comparing the bitmasks of two words, we can efficiently check if two words have common letters. If the result of a bitwise AND operation between two masks is zero, then the two words do not share any common letters.

With the bitmask precomputation step, the time complexity is reduced significantly because the comparison of every pair now only takes constant time, O(1), leading to an overall time complexity of O(n^2 + n * m). Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of the solution approach:

1. Iterate through each word in the input, calculate its bitmask, and store these masks in an array.
2. Iterate through all pairs of words. For each pair, use the precomputed bitmasks to check if the words share common letters by performing a bitwise AND operation.
3. If the words do not share any common letters (bitwise AND result is 0), calculate the product of their lengths and update the answer with the maximum product found so far.
4. After checking all pairs, return the maximum product found.

This bitmasking technique leverages the power of bitwise operations to significantly improve the time efficiency for checking if two words have common letters.

Solution Approach

The solution uses a bit manipulation technique along with an array for storing the bitmasks. Here's a step-by-step breakdown of the implementation:

1. Initial Setup

   • Calculate the number n of words in the input list.
   • Initialize an array mask of length n to store the bitmasks which will represent the unique characters of each word by setting the bit position corresponding to each letter.

2. Creating Bitmasks

   • Iterate through the list of words with the index i. For each word word[i], do the following:
     • Initialize mask[i] to 0.
     • For each character ch in word[i], shift 1 left by ord(ch) - ord('a') bits to create a bitmask for the letter.
     • Use the bitwise OR | operation to update mask[i] by turning on the bit corresponding to each character in the word.

3. Finding the Maximum Product

   • Initialize a variable ans to 0 for storing the maximum product found.
   • Iterate through all unique pairs of words with indices i and j (with j > i to avoid duplication of pairs), to compare their bitmasks.
     • If the bitwise AND & of mask[i] and mask[j] is 0, it means the words have no common letters.
     • If so, calculate the product of their lengths len(words[i]) * len(words[j]).
     • Update ans with the maximum of itself and the calculated product.

4. Returning the Result

   • After checking all pairs, return ans as the final result.

The code uses bitmasks stored in an integer to efficiently represent and compare the characters of the words. Rather than checking each letter individually for every pair, the solution leverages bitwise operations to check for common letters in constant time, greatly enhancing performance.

Example Walkthrough

Let's take an example array of strings words = ["abc", "de", "fg", "hi", "aeh"].

• The first step is to represent each word by a bitmask. Let's work through the words:

  • For word "abc", the bitmask would be (set bit positions at 0, 1, 2): 0b111 which is 7 in decimal.
  • For word "de", the bitmask would be (set bit positions at 3, 4): 0b11000 which is 24 in decimal.
  • For word "fg", the bitmask would be (set bit positions at 5, 6): 0b1100000 which is 96 in decimal.
  • For word "hi", the bitmask would be (set bit positions at 7, 8): 0b110000000 which is 384 in decimal.
  • For "aeh", the bitmask is (set bit positions at 0, 4, 7): 0b10010001 which is 145 in decimal.

• As a result, the mask array after processing the words array would be [7, 24, 96, 384, 145].

• In the next step, we will look for pairs of words with no overlapping bits in their bitmasks:

  • Compare "abc" (7) and "de" (24): (7 & 24) equals 0 which means no common letters. Product of lengths equals 3 * 2 = 6.
  • Compare "abc" (7) and "fg" (96): (7 & 96) equals 0; product is 3 * 2 = 6.
  • Compare "abc" (7) and "hi" (384): (7 & 384) equals 0; product is 3 * 2 = 6.
  • Compare "abc" (7) and "aeh" (145): (7 & 145) is not 0 as they share letters, so do not calculate product.
  • Compare "de" (24) and "fg" (96): (24 & 96) equals 0; product is 2 * 2 = 4.
  • Compare "de" (24) and "hi" (384): (24 & 384) equals 0; product is 2 * 2 = 4.
  • Compare "de" (24) and "aeh" (145): (24 & 145) is not 0, so do not calculate product.
  • Compare "fg" (96) and "hi" (384): (96 & 384) equals 0; product is 2 * 2 = 4.
  • Compare "fg" (96) and "aeh" (145): (96 & 145) equals 0; product of lengths is 2 * 3 = 6.
  • Compare "hi" (384) and "aeh" (145): (384 & 145) equals 0; product is 2 * 3 = 6.

• The final step is to find the maximum product from these comparisons:

  • The calculated products are 6, 6, 6, 4, 4, 4, 6, 6.
  • The maximum product is 6.

• Return the maximum product, which is 6. The words yielding this product are "abc" with "de", "abc" with "fg", "abc" with "hi", "fg" with "aeh", and "hi" with "aeh".

This illustrates how the bitmask approach greatly simplifies the computation and avoids the overhead of checking each letter individually. The final solution would implement the process outlined in the “Solution Approach” section efficiently by leveraging bitwise operations and precomputation of the bitmasks for each word.

Solution Implementation

Time and Space Complexity

The provided code calculates the maximum product of the lengths of two words such that the two words do not share any common characters. The analysis of time and space complexity is as follows:

Time Complexity

1. Calculating the bitmask for each word: The first loop goes through each word and each character within those words to create a bitmask. This process occurs in O(N * L) time, where N is the number of words, and L is the average length of the words.

2. Comparing the bitmasks: The nested loop compares each pair of generated bitmasks. This results in O(N^2) comparisons, since each word's bitmask is compared with every other word's bitmask.

3. Checking for common characters and updating the maximum product happens in constant time, O(1), for each pair of words compared.

Combining these steps, the overall time complexity is O(N * L + N^2).

Since typically L <= 1000 and the main contributing factor for large inputs is N, and because N^2 grows faster than N * L, the N^2 term dominates for large N, so the overall time complexity can be considered O(N^2).

Space Complexity

1. The space used to store the bitmasks: For N words, we store a bitmask for each, which uses O(N) space.

2. No additional significant space is used, since other variables use constant space.

Hence, the space complexity of the code is O(N).

Learn more about how to find time and space complexity quickly using problem constraints.